How To Install MODX CMS

Here are Web Courses Bangkok we offer MODX training for one-to-one tuition, if you’ve alread learnt some web design basics and you’ve learnt how to use WordPress then MODX is a good next step.

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to setup a basic installation of MODX so you can see what its all about. Follow these simple steps and you should be on your way, if not then feel free to leave any questions in the comments.

Step One – Downloading MODX

First you will need to download MODX, there are a couple of ways to do this but the fastest is straight from the MODX Downloads page. Here you want to make sure you grab the Traditional version of the release and not the Advanced version.

As a side-note its worth knowing that these downloads are taken straight from MODX’s Git Hub repository, which you can view here: https://github.com/modxcms/revolution If you wanted to get the most up-to-date version you can download it straight from the repository.

Step Two – Starting the Setup

Next you will need to unzip the download and then upload the files to your server, or alternatively upload the zip file and upzip it there if you know how.

At this point you will want to take a look at the MODX Server Requirements page on their site: http://rtfm.modx.com/display/revolution20/Server+Requirements if you’re unsure if your server can run MODX then email your hosting support and they should be able to help you. Generally most shared hosting can run MODX without any problems.

Step Three – Installing MODX

On the first screen you will need to select your language, once you’ve done this click continue and you’ll see the following options:

If you are upgrading your installation of MODX the second option will be available, but for this tutorial we will just go ahead with a standard new installation. Click next and you will see the following screen:

This is one of the most important steps of the installation. Unless you have some kind of weird setup your Database Host will usually be localhost, if you get an error at the end about the Database Host then contact your hosting provider.

You will need to have already created a new, blank database, you can usually do this through phpMyAdmin. There’s usually a link from your hosting control panel to the phpMyAdmin and there’s plenty of online tutorials for setting up databases. A quick Google search reveals plenty of other online tutorials: https://www.google.com/search?q=phpmyadmin+setup+database

So once you have made your new database you’ll need to enter the database username and the database password; then enter the name of the new database you have just created and set a table prefix.

The table prefix is a useful way to group MODX websites together in the same database, you might be familiar with this if you’ve ever installed WordPress. A WordPress installation is prefixed with “wp_”, so if you chose “modx_” for your installation here you’d be able to store it in the same database as a WordPress site to save space.

Once you have filled in all that info click the “Test database server connection and view collations” link and you should see the following screen:

If you see an error message follow the instructions until you see the success message. At this stage you’ve not actually created the MODX database but instead you’ve just run a test, next you’ll want to create the default database.

Before you can do that you need to set the character set for your site, I usually go for utf8 and utf8_general_ci, this includes the widest variety of characters and I usually don’t get any problems with this. If however your site is going to be in a language with different glyphs, such as Chinese or Japanese make sure you select the appropriate character set.

Once you have done this click “Create or test selection of your database” and you’ll see the final part of this screen:

Here you need to setup the main administrator account for your site, choose a user name and fill in the rest of your details and click next. The next two screen you’ll see will be instillation summaries, they should look something like this:

Now you have successfully installed MODX on your server, the next screen will give you an option to keep the setup files on your server or to delete them. Its more secure to delete them once you’re finished so make sure you select this.

Step Four – Finishing Up

Then you’ll be able to login with the user name and password you created:

Now you’re ready to go ahead and start experimenting with MODX. In my next article I will show you how to install a few of the essential plugins.